The power of technology to ‘improve the world’
The Jewish-owned business celebrated its 10th anniversary last year and is what Melamed describes as the "business-to-business equivalent of a dating site".
Founder and managing director of tech start-up Matchboard Sharon Melamed admits she herself is “not a techie”.
The Jewish-owned business celebrated its 10th anniversary last year and is what Melamed describes as the “business-to-business equivalent of a dating site”.
Melamed, who has a degree is foreign languages, got into the tech industry by accident when she had the idea for her business matchmaking start-up, which has technology at its heart.
Matchboard uses a similar algorithm to a dating site but is a business-to-business version.
“While I used to think of technology as boring, now I realise its power to change and improve the world in so many exciting ways – in health, agriculture, education and so many other areas. It’s those outcomes that you need to focus on rather than the technology in and of itself,” Melamed told The AJN.
Melamed’s biggest challenge getting Matchboard off the ground was finding a vendor to develop the matchmaking platform.
She told The AJN, “I hopped on Google to start the search. Seven out of 10 vendors I shortlisted never returned my enquiry, two didn’t get my brief, and one had a zero too many in its cost estimate. It was pure fate that around that time I’d planned a holiday to see family in Israel, where I came across an entrepreneurial 20-person software development company called Go-Net.”
They made Melamed an unbeatable offer, to develop the Matchboard platform at cost price, in exchange for the rights to use the source code in the domestic Israeli market.
“The start-up nation at its most innovative!” Melamed said, adding, “We immediately got started and 10 years later, the partnership continues. Go-Net has such high-calibre talent, and has delivered on time, on budget every time, I feel so lucky to have found them.”
Part of the inspiration for the Matchboard platform came from her Jewish upbringing.
“Matchmaking is arguably the oldest profession in the Jewish community! I guess it’s in my blood as I always got a thrill out of matchmaking people, I even matched my brother and his wife,” Melamed said.
So when it came to launching her own business, Melamed used this practice as a model to create a website that matches companies with their perfect match suppliers for free, as she “didn’t want to create another dating site as there are so many of those”, she explained.
This month, Matchboard passed 4400 buy-side clients, ranging from thousands of small and medium enterprises to hundreds of household brands.
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